"It's hard to get the idea, but children bully, and bullying requires some planning," explains Ana Cobos, a counselor at a public high school in Malaga. The bully wants to have bystanders and success, so he chooses someone without friends. "He does not want a situation of equality, but a submissive victim who is going to suffer," says the expert, who recalls that cases of bullying in Spain are negligible. The academic literature on bullying put on the table more than a decade ago that friendships are the main barrier to protection. Now, a team of researchers from different Spanish universities has quantified what personal connections in a classroom mean when predicting possible victims of bullying: each extra friend reduces the risk by 10%, while each enemy increases it by 12%.
"It has already been seen that personal connections are relevant in many social problems, for example, the number of friends is an important variable to know the probabilities of coming out of a depression; now we have taken it to the field of harassment, "says Antonio Cabrales, professor of Economics at the Carlos III University and co-author of the study Predictors of bullying and victimization at school: an approach from the networks, carried out with 3,700 students from first to fourth of ESO (between 11 and 16 years old) from 16 educational centers. "Who your friends are greatly influences the lives of adolescents in terms of health or academic performance, we wanted to quantify the impact when it comes to being a victim of bullying, "he adds.
To collect the data, the students answered a one-hour questionnaire in which, among other points, they had to point out who of their classmates were being harassed, and from a list with all the names of the students in the class, say who were friends, best friends, or people with whom they do not have a good relationship or for some reason disliked them, as well as those with whom they had a worse relationship. "When crossing all the data, we saw that those who perceived themselves as victims and who at the same time were pointed out by others, claimed to have more enmities than friendships," says Cabrales. 75% of students who were bullied reported having more than three enmities in the classroom; and 98% said they had at least one friend. "When enemies outnumber friends, that's where the alerts should jump, even if it's by simple majority," says the expert.
On the degree of novelty of the work, Pablo Brañas, researcher in Economics at Loyola University and co-author of the study, points out that traditional papers have not studied the impact of hate networks on bullying from a numerical perspective, since the academic literature on this subject is usually carried out from areas such as education or psychology. And it is not so common that it is analyzed from a mathematical point of view.
In the work, in which researchers from the University of the Basque Country have also participated, it was seen that other factors such as obesity do not have a potential to predict bullying as strong as friendships. The kids had to choose between eight morphological figures, according to their self-perception of the body, from thinner to more obese. Those who did not suffer bullying presented an average of 4.2, while in the victims it was 4.3. At the academic level, it was seen that the bullied obtained 30% less outstanding than the rest.
In Spain, there are no official data on the percentage of students who suffer bullying. The only data available is that contained in the PISA report, prepared by the OECD, which in its 2018 edition reflected that 17% of 15-year-old students have suffered it in some of the educational stages (compared to an average of 23% of OECD countries). According to Cabrales' study, 13% of the participants were victims of bullying (8.2% of the total are boys, and 4.6%, girls).
One of the characteristics of bullying is that the victim does not usually raise his voice and communicate it to his family or teachers. Therefore, the objective of this study is to offer a tool to schools to detect with this questionnaire possible victims before harassment occurs. "Within the classroom, teachers find it difficult to identify relationships, we only see part of reality because we see them in a context of scheduled activities ... I don't know what percentage of the iceberg we perceive," says Francis Lapuente, a mathematics teacher at the Blas de Otero public high school in Madrid, one of the centers that participated in the study.
The results of the questionnaire are handled with name and surname only from the guidance department of the centers to preserve the privacy of the answers. Silvia Ibáñez is the teacher who works in this service at Blas de Otero: "The tool is very useful because in addition to the radiography of relationships, it has an algorithm that allows us to design the ideal of grouping the kids for the following courses; There are students who do not do well to be together and sometimes you have to choose to separate them, it is good to be able to mix them optimally".
Another advantage is that you can see that some of the kids who report not having friends have been included in the network of friends of other colleagues. "In a hidden way, we make things happen that would not happen naturally to bring these people closer, for example, we favor couples in physical education ... We make their day-to-day life more bearable without them noticing," says the teacher. "Through our intervention, we can break down structures and change the way students are treated."
The questionnaire is passed at three different times of the course, so it allows them to "strengthen" suspicions of bad relationships and act. "Thanks to our specific interventions, we have seen changes in the intensity of conflicts," says Ibáñez. The tool has allowed them to see that only 60% of reported friendships are reciprocal. "There are kids who are not catching the social life of the institute, they think they have many friends and they do not have them," explains Anxo Sánchez, professor in Applied Mathematics at Carlos III who has also participated in the work. The research is part of a pioneering project called TeensLab, a consortium of different universities (Loyola, UB, Carlos III, Granada and University of the Basque Country) united to investigate the behavior of adolescents.
For Araceli Suárez, president of the Andalusian federation of counselors, it is very difficult to understand the relationships between adolescents and tools of this type can be very useful. "If you get into their Instagram accounts, you see that they insult each other, that is part of their codes and from the outside they seem integrated, included in social dynamics. Adults do not know how to see it, and those who are being harassed are holding on in silence until they explode, or not."